Impending Doom of Planet Earth
In modern times, the impending doom of all life on Earth via climate change is a fear stuck in the back of everyone’s mind. It is important to know just how realistic that fear is by learning the factors that lead to climate change and also by examining who exactly is causing all this damage to our beloved planet. A heavy-hitter in the damage against our environment is how we, as humans, produce energy, and subsequently electricity. As most people know, there are non-renewable and renewable sources of energy which are used to provide us with the energy we need to power our lives. While non-renewable resources are consumed much quicker and have wider applications, their supply is very limited and a day will come when we will eventually run out. They play a significantly negative role in climate change, which is easily the most important problem humanity is currently facing. People tend to gravitate towards non-renewable sources due to how cost-effective they are and how easy they are to extract. What those people fail to recognize is the deadly consequences that come with it. From rising sea levels to regularly occurring droughts and floods that threaten the foot and water supply for billions of people across the globe. With that said, there is hope; by shifting towards renewable sources, our knight in shining armour; it can provide us with reliable and eco-friendly power supply, all while boosting the global economy. Unfortunately, renewable sources are expensive but it is a small price to pay for the survival of the planet. In this article, we hope to show you, through data visualizations, the realities of how different regions in the world contribute to climate change and conversely how some regions are affected by climate change.
Renewable and Non-Renewable Electricity Production
The first visualization is a choropleth map demonstrating the percentage difference of renewable and non-renewable electricity production for each country from 2000 to 2019. Each country uses various methods to generate energy. Whether it be oil, coal, wind, solar, hydro, and many more. We have grouped those sources into renewable and non-renewable, treating the renewable share as a positive number and non-renewable share as a negative. For example, a country using 80% non-sustainable energy and 20% sustainable energy; the percent difference would be -80% + 20% = -60%. With this calculation as the marker for each country’s sustainable energy use, a colour scheme has been provided to distinguish our “heroes” and our “villains” in this fight against climate change. Additionally, selecting or hovering over any country specifically shows the exact percent of renewable and non-renewable energy production of that particular year for that country alone. We encourage you to zoom into different regions while using the time slider to see ow certain countries produce electricity over time. For a more holistic view, one can see the heat map presented below the map which shows the change in usage of energy throughout the years of each continent. The heat-map also contains interactive hover features that communicate more precise information.
From the map, almost all the leading economies of the world consistently fell deeply in the red zones of the spectrum while a lot of the mid to small sized economies fell on the blue side. Make note of several African and South American countries being consistently in the deep blue zones over the years and being our saviours in the fight against climate change. Other than them, it is looking quite bleak for Mother Earth. Asides from these regions, which coincidentally all fall close to the equator, almost the entire world is in red. From the heat-map we can see a more broadened view of the changes, which still aren’t looking too promising. Every continent averaged, by median, is in deep red. Although most continents are getting lighter and moving towards an even balance of renewable and non-renewable sources, if we want to see significant improvements in the state of the global environment’s health, we need to chose those red values into blues.
Impact on Climate Change vs. Vulnerability to Climate Change
Based on the results from the map, we loosely hypothesized that perhaps more powerful countries, like USA, China, Russia, and India, will have the biggest impact on climate change, due to their need to manufacture and provide electricity to more people and much more, and subsequently will be less vulnerable due to their economic power. Put another way, the bigger the country’s impact on climate change, the less vulnerable they will be once climate change becomes a reality. The poorer countries who are consistently using renewable sources, are the ones who will be more vulnerable.
We put this theory to the test by constructing two visualizations plotting CO2 emissions on the x-axis, which we are using as a gauge for impact on climate change, against vulnerability to climate change on the y-axis. Vulnerability is measured from an external organization done by David Wheeler and the Center for Global Development; factors such as sea level rise, extreme weather, and agricultural loss are some of the factors which are accounted for and is given an Climate Change Vulnerability Index (CCVI) score from 0 to 100, 100 being most vulnerable.
In the first visualization, we used the same colour scheme from the map shown earlier for you to see the patterns between electricity production, impact on climate change (CO2 emissions), and vulnerability to climate change. We encourage you to make use of the hover options available on this visualization and perhaps try to guess which countries lie in different areas of the graph. Upon hovering you will find exact metrics of emissions, vulnerability, and percent difference of renewable and non-renewable electricity production.
In the second visual, the colour scheme is based on continents and make sure to use the interactive components on this visual as you can toggle on/off the continents which you wish to see or not see by clicking on the points in the legend. Again, hovering over points will provide you with exact metrics of emissions and vulnerability
As you can see, there is a clear correlation between these metrics and to go even further, we ran a linear regression model and a Pearson correlation test and we arrived at a correlation of -0.44 and a p-value of essentially 0; meaning that our “loose” hypothesis earlier was essentially correct and as emissions/impact on climate change increases, the vulnerability to the effects of climate change decreases.
The patterns in the colour scheme offer an interesting insight. Normally, we would expect countries with more usage of non-renewable sources to have higher amounts of CO2 emissions, however, we can see from the first scatter-plot that it is not the case. For example, the country of Nauru uses only non-renewable sources of energy but has one of the least CO2 emissions. So looking at this we can say that there are other factors that may come into play like the size of the country when it comes to CO2 emissions and not just the usage of non-renewable or renewable sources of energy. From the second scatter-plot we can see that most of the European points lie below the regression line indicating that most countries in Europe are less vulnerable and as the venerability decreases the CO2 emission increases, Germany being a prime example. Majority of the Asian countries lie above the line of best fit indicating higher vulnerability while most of the Oceania countries represented by pink have emissions less than 1000kt.
Fight for Our Planet
All in all, climate change is undoubtedly upon and throughout this article we have seen the harsh realities of what some countries in the world are doing. We aimed to highlight these realities and through a series of graphs we hope you, as a reader understand the challenge that Mother Earth is facing. We are citizens of the Earth, not owners of it, there are billions of other species of life that exist out there and for humans to think for their own personal interest is immoral. We must take action and fight for the change we want to see. To think that countries like USA and China, who have such astronomical CO2 emissions, will suffer almost no consequences and then a country like Burundi, who uses 97% renewable energy and emits minuscule amount of CO2 will likely be submerged under water, suffer complete agricultural loss, face extreme weather, or perhaps suffer all the above. It is injustices like these which we must shine light on so that the governments of bully nations like USA and China must make significant changes to their environmental policies so as to not hurt someone who was not even fighting in the first place.